Prehistoric Cataclysm

The Dry Falls

Dry Falls Washington

We spent the night at Sandpoint Idaho, which is on Pend Orelle, a large lake in the Panhandle of Idaho that was formed by the outflow from Glacial Lake Missoula. Glaciers would periodically dam up the flow of the Clark Fork to form a lake with up to 550 cubic miles of water in the valleys of the mountains of Montana. When these ice dams would break this lake would drain in as little as four days. The ensuing floods would flow over Eastern Washington. The result is known as the Scablands. In one place, now known as Grand Coulee, this flow was concentrated along an existing valley. The falls created by these floods eroded the Grand Coulee back into the volcanic plateau over 20 miles. The Dry Falls behind Fran are the result of these floods. The pools at the bottom are plunge pools from the falls. The picture above only shows about half of the width of the Coulee. The top picture shows the huge dry falls.

During these floods, the flow over these falls would exceed the flow of all of the world's rivers combined. It is an amazing sight. (PBS sometimes has an excellent program about them.) Fortunately all this happened, and happened over again during the last Ice Age.  

Later we went into the Ginko Petrified Forest, an area of petrified wood and Indian petroglyphs that were very beautiful and interesting.

All in all, it was a fascinating day. Eastern Washington was a veritable sea of wheat fields—they absolutely engulfed us. Farmsteads in the distance would be swallowed up by the rolling fields. Then we went into quite a desert, mostly earth, rock, and sagebrush, which surprised us since we think of Washington as a maritime state. Eventually, rising above the desert was Mount Ranier—what a giant!  Gradually we left the desert behind and began to enter mountains covered with more and more evergreen trees. After Snoqualmie Pass, we passed through the outskirts of Seattle, and are tucked into Bremerton tonight. We leave for Victoria in the morning.

I've been overwhelmed for several days by the mountains, mountains, ranges of mountains. I had no idea there were so many mountain ranges in the west.  

Don tells me we've now traveled about 3600 miles, which in some weird way means we're halfway home!

Thanks to my conversation with Elaine this morning, I've been able to load pictures.  So, for any of you who are interested, I'll add the planned pictures on the earlier blogs.